I’m working through Dylan songs in roughly alphabetical order looking for cover versions that are available free of charge on the internet and which offer an extra insight into the songs. And this little article contains some meandering around … but if you have a few moments please stay with me because it ends with a masterpiece of musical invention.
So, to start from the start, I would love to be able to include a cover version of “In the Garden” at this point, just to see what others might make of its very odd musical construction, but I can only find one, and I really don’t like it. Taking a song like that and just building up the hype doesn’t work for me on a musical level, so it is set aside and I have to move on.
“In the Summer time” comes up next and here again I can only find one cover that has a video freely available and it is by Chrissie Hynde. We’ve already picked out this cover before in Jochen’s article on the song, and it is certainly worth a repeat.
This was part of a lockdown project in which the band recorded nine Dylan songs and which we covered in part as they were released. It was fun then, as it is now.
So moving on again, “Is your love in vain” turns out once more to be a song that artists don’t really want to record, although it is part of the Girl from the North Country show and on this video starts around 4 minutes 30 seconds.
And so I move onto Isis and at last I have re-workings that I can evolve some prose of praise around. Julie Corbalis .
Now taking on this song as a solo with just acoustic guitar as backing is one hell of a venture – it is a long piece of course which has the most extraordinary lyrics. But here’s the problem – most of all already know all the lyrics by heart, so stripping up the band puts an awful lot on the vocal, especially if the accompaniment is simply strumming the guitar.
But I think she does give it a good bash. And full marks for attempting what I don’t think many others have done.
By way of contrast we have Popa Chubby, who again goes for a less than full band approach, although not as minimalist as Julie Corbalis. I think Popa gets more out of the lyrics than Julie – I feel a much greater need to listen and focus, maybe because of the variation in his approach, maybe the three musicians are so in tune with each other through the arrangement. After each short instrumental break I’m ready to hear how he’s going to deliver the next verse. After each verse I’m ready to hear what the band is going to next.
And finally something different again. I love this Vitamin String Quartet instrumental. If you have the time do go straight from the Popa Chubby version above into the VSQ – the VSQ version is almost a coda to the Chubby performance. Of course this is helped by the fact that both performances are in the same key, but there is something more than that. The VSQ version really is a final commentary on everything Popa Chubby puts into the piece. And in many ways a final commentary on the composition.
I rather enjoyed that.
Here’s a list of most of the articles from this series…
When I get close to finishing my survey of a particular year of the NET, I often end with a rather ragbag collection of performances that are too good or too interesting to leave on the cutting room floor.
Take, for example, this version of ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ from the Glasgow concert.
It ain’t me babe
It has a lot going for it. A powerful vocal and harmonica, an intriguing steady beat, and a completely new arrangement. The problem here is because at some stage in the past we have bonded with a song, with its previous incarnation, because we have loved it so much, identified with the particular performance that struck us, we find it hard to take in a new vision of the song. Then we start making up all sorts of reasons why it is inferior to the one we identify with.
It took me a while with this ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ but I think I finally got it. Despite the rigidity of the beat and the awkwardness in the way some of the vocal lines fit, it’s a powerful reconfiguration of the song.
I could say something similar about this performance of the soul-searching folk ballad, ‘If You See Her Say Hello’ from Blood on the Tracks:
If you see her say hello
It comes out as a country rock song, which gives it an upbeat mood. It took me a while to get used to it as a foot-tapper, but the change in tempo hasn’t worn the painful edge off the song. Dylan makes some significant changes to the lyrics here. I haven’t tried to transcribe them, but they are worth noting. There’s a bit more bitterness in these lyrics, which remind me of the slow, agonizing, 1976 performance with the lyrics transformed into a much darker, more bitter mood. Dylan seems to veer from performing this as a ‘nice’ song with laudable sentiments, to a splenetic expression of grief. The miracle of the song is that it is both at the same time. (No date for that one, I’m sorry)
The essence of a song, however, can’t change, and that’s evident from this countrified ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,’ from the Toronto show (20th March)
I’ll be your baby tonight
It sounds great as a 1950’s style pop song. You could dance around the jukebox to this one. The careless beat, the apparent careless delivery. One of Dylan’s few genuinely carefree songs. He plays brilliantly with the vocal, playing a little tipsy (‘bring that bottle over here’), almost missing the beat but not quite. We can revel in the retro feel of it.
Rainy Day Woman is another song easy to overlook, and yet those brassy, insouciant opening chords, seeming to herald the arrival of the ringmaster of a circus, first pulled us into Blonde on Blonde. Hard to credit, fifty-five years on, just how provocative and dangerous this song was at the time. Play it too loud and you might get the police knocking at your door. It’s fine to sing this one with a bit of a stoned stumble. It’s all in good fun.
Rainy Day Woman
‘Tryin’ to Get to Heaven Before They Close the Door,’ from Time Out Of Mind benefits from the lusher sound Dylan achieves in 2004. There’s a sense of resignation in it. And that profound disorientation that marks most of the songs on the album:
They tell me everything is gonna be all right
But I don't know what "all right" even means
I couldn’t possibly have left out this beautifully considered performance.
Tryin’ to get to heaven
Any performance of ‘Man in the Long Black Coat’ is hard to overlook. It’s such a drama of seduction (but who’s seducing who?), and a marvellous mood piece. While I don’t think Dylan has ever matched the soaring 1995 performance at Prague, the song never fails to cast its spell. In this one Dylan slows the tempo way down and creates a spooky atmosphere with his echoey voice.
Man in the long black coat.
I nearly left ‘Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum’ behind, but realized in time that this was only my own preference in action. Like any other compiler making a selection, I tend to favour songs with which I have formed a strong connection.
It’s not just the words themselves which seem obscure, probably no more so than other Dylan songs from “Love and Theft” but what may be driving the song. Often, despite the complexities in a Dylan song, most songs have a powerful affective centre. Look at the emotional drive in ‘Man In the Long Black Coat.’ The sense of horror and loss.
‘Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum’ doesn’t seem to have that kind of easily identifiable drive. I do see how it evokes the era of the 1920s and 30s, and I can see there’s a story of betrayal here, but I don’t have enough to answer the deceptively simple question – why did Dylan write this song? Favourite lines:
They walk among the stately trees
They know the secrets of the breeze
What also convinced me to include the song was the superior nature of the recording at Rochester. If any performance is going to get the song across it will be this one.
Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum
‘God Knows’ is a song about war, and the imminence of war, although the lyrics might apply to a personal relationship. Being able to sing of the personal and the political at the same time is one of Dylan’s great achievements. When I hear these lines,
God knows it’s fragile
God knows everything
God knows it could snap apart right now
Just like putting scissors to a string
I can’t help thinking of the situation in Ukraine unfolding as I write. The stretched tension in those lines is palpable. Maybe it has already snapped apart like putting scissors to a string. Can we face it?
God knows it’s terrifying
God sees it all unfold
This is another Dylan song that doesn’t lose its relevance as time goes on.
God Knows
We have heard some exquisite performances of ‘Girl from the North Country’ over the past few years, and since 1999 especially. Mostly quite delicate, acoustic pieces. However, like all the very early songs Dylan is still performing, the song has had to adapt to the piano. Dylan uses the same baroque arrangement as in 2003, but this Glasgow performance has a special warmth that marks that concert out in 2004. When it begins, it almost has the feel of a medieval madrigal. Dylan’s tribute to this early love is warm and affectionate, the harp has just the right touch of pathos, and it’s hard not to feel a tear in your eye. We might love those old acoustic guitar versions, but there’s no doubt this one has the power to move us.
Girl from the North Country
‘Positively 4th Street’ is famous as an attack song:
You got a lotta nerve
To say you are my friend..
But while this performance is not exactly affectionate, with Dylan’s rough been-through-the-mill voice, tired and world-weary, these lines seem to have lost their most vicious edge. There are two performances of this one I think are of interest. The first is from Toronto, and Dylan puts some roughness into his voice, maybe trying to keep the sentimentality out. Toughening it up.
Positively 4th Street (A)
This second performance (date unknown) sounds more in sorrow than anger. The same song, slightly different edge.
Positively 4th Street (B)
‘Saving Grace’ from Saved (1980) is something of a rarity. It is however a song that well suits Dylan’s rough careworn 2004 voice.
Death is often mentioned in the song; it’s near death that we might feel that ‘saving grace’ and the ongoing miracle of being alive. The sense that the prospect of death brings us closer to grace is the song’s driver, and Dylan’s 2004 crackle sounds closer to that ‘pine box for all eternity’ than the warm, vibrant album version. And is there not also a touch of wistfulness in it? That saving grace is there, but can we always feel it? And do we deserve it? There is perhaps as much hope as there is faith in this performance.
Saving Grace
‘Dignity’ is a song I can easily overlook as it seems like a second rank Dylan song, but it’s a rocker with a swirling movement. I had it on my list for Part 5 of 2004, but it didn’t quite make the cut. This Rochester performance however is full of vigour. Can’t resist a performance with this flair, and I’m happy to slip it in here.
Dignity
I went down where the vultures feed
I would've got deeper, but there wasn't any need
Heard the tongues of angels and the tongues of men
Wasn't any difference to me
Chilly wind sharp as a razor blade
House on fire, debts unpaid
Gonna stand at the window, gonna ask the maid
Have you seen dignity
With lyrics like that, how come we tend to think of it as a ‘second rank’ Dylan song? Is there any such thing?
Acoustic or electric, ‘Masters of War’ has always been a strident song, but by 2004 that stridency has given way to a more funereal, threatening atmosphere, supported by Dylan’s dark thumping on the piano. I’d love to see this performance (8th Oct, Fishkill) put on You Tube as background to scenes from the Ukraine war. Still another song that’s kept its relevance.
Masters of War
While on the subject of war, I nearly overlooked this ‘Cat’s in the Well’ from the Manchester concert. Another of those ‘second rank’ Dylan songs. Wonderful vocal performance from Dylan. Listen to how he stages these lines. I’ve tried to set them out as I hear them.
The cat's in the well, the horse is going bump etybump.
The cat's in the well, and the horse is going bump ety bump.
Back alley Sally is doin’ the Ameeeer ican jump.
Maybe this song would be a good one to play against the background of the Ukraine war. ‘The dogs are going to war’… they sure are. The song’s last line, ‘Goodnight my love, may the lord have mercy on us all’ seems like the perfect way to finish this post.
Cat’s in the well
So that’s it for now…. But hey! wait a minute, isn’t there something we might’ve missed? A song in the shadows? Ah, how could I forget the old warhorse, ‘Tangled up in Blue’? Gotta slip it in at the end here. This is a song that, like Dylan himself, just keeps on keeping on. (Toronto)
Tangled Up in Blue
Ah! That’s better. See you soon with a brief epilogue for 2004 – some on the non-
Dylan songs he covered that year.
Now I heard of a guy who lived a long time ago
A man full of sorrow and strife
That if someone around him died and was dead
He knew how to bring ’em on back to life
Well I don’t know what kind of language he used
Or if they do that kind of thing anymore
Sometimes I think nobody ever saw me here at all
Except the girl from the red river shore
In The Graham Norton Show, former Friends actor Matthew Perry tells the amusing story of how, in a bar, he met M. Night Shyamalan, whom he knows a little because six months earlier he had presented an award to Bruce Willis for his impressive role in The Sixth Sense. And in the process, he got to say hello to the rest of the cast and the director. Perry spends an exceptionally enjoyable, alcohol-soaked evening with the world-famous director, they go to another joint together and Matthew is already dreaming of a major role in one of Shyamalan’s next films. When the director goes to the toilet, Perry is approached by an acquaintance who happens to be passing by.
“He said, how’s your night going, and I said: what, are you kidding? I’m having the greatest night of my life. M. Night Shyamalan and I have been hanging out for the last two and a half hours. It’s been great. And M. Night Shyamalan came back from the bathroom and my friend said: that’s not M. Night Shyamalan.
And it wasn’t. It was just an Indian gentleman who looked a lot like M. Night Shyamalan.”
Perry’s eagerness is understandable. He is offered plenty of roles, but all in the romantic comedy department, and M. Night Shyamalan is Hollywood’s golden boy at the time, after the smashing, worldwide success of the occult thriller The Sixth Sense. (1999). That success is 90% due to the script, also written by director Shyamalan. And especially because of its mindfuck quality, the bewildering twist at the end that the main character, psychologist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), is dead – we have unsuspectingly been sympathising and identifying with a ghost all this time, a ghost that, apart from the cinema audience, is only seen by the other main character, nine-year-old Cole “I see dead people” Sear.
Cole also learns why these ghosts are wandering around: they have unfinished business, only see what they want to see and don’t even know they’re dead. And that all sounds awfully close to Dylan’s protagonist, after hearing the last two lines;
Sometimes I think nobody ever saw me here at all
Except the girl from the red river shore
… lines spoken by the protagonist after he announces that he is looking for a guy who can bring the dead back to life.
There are enough lines to be drawn from Shyamalan to Dylan. He uses Dylan’s music in his films, calls Dylan one of his great heroes in interviews and even confesses to feeling a kind of telepathic connection with the Bard (in Michael Bamberger’s weirdly hagiographic, authorised study The Man Who Heard Voices, 2006).
But the suggestion that these two Dylan lines inspired his one great masterpiece is way too far-fetched. It is highly unlikely that the script-writing director could have heard the unreleased song from January 1997 at the time he was writing the screenplay for The Sixth Sense. And then again, the concept of the-one-who-can-see-ghosts is not that unique.
Meg Ryan sees the angel Nicolas Cage in City Of Angels, the Hollywoodised version of the brilliant Wim Wenders film Der Himmel über Berlin (1987). Whoopi Goldberg is the only one who can hear the murdered Patrick Swayze in Ghost (1990). Nicolas Roeg’s classic Don’t Look Now, in a way. And the witty Ricky Gervais as a blunt dentist in Ghost Town (2008) is also the only one who can see dead people – the idea was of course created for horror, but is surprisingly often used in romantic comedies and child-friendly family films as well.
But what sets Dylan’s “Red River Shore” apart from all those stories, and what it shares with The Sixth Sense, is its surprising twist. I think nobody ever saw me here at all offers, in its final lines, a new scenario that overturns all that has gone before; the scenario in which the narrator dwells in the shadows of a fading past, wanders in the dimension where the angels fly, living in the moonlight, seeks his soul’s rest there where the black winds roar, for whom the sun doesn’t shine anymore…
The closing lines offer the advanced insight that we have listened to a jeremiad of a wandering soul, of a spirit that has unfinished business and that probably does not even realise that he is dead. At least, he seems to be surprised that no one can see him. Except the girl from the Red River shore. And it turns the motivation to find the guy who can bring the dead back to life; this is not a repentant murderer trying to undo his misdeed with the reanimation of the Red River girl, but he himself, like the angel Nicolas Cage and the jazz pianist Joe Gardner, wants to be brought back to life.
Nice twist – though far from conclusive. Dylan’s apparent dissatisfaction with “Red River Shore” (the song is discarded for Time Out Of Mind and never put on the setlist either – it belongs to the rather select club of Dylan songs completely ignored by the master himself) may have something to do with its imbalance.
Comparably great works like “Blind Willie McTell” and “Series Of Dreams” are, after initial rejection, eventually rehabilitated. “Series Of Dreams” is admitted to the stage in Vienna, Virginia (8 September 1993) four years after its demotion to outtake, and performed nine more times thereafter. “Blind Willie McTell” takes longer to be rehabilitated, but then returns all the more glorious; to the dismay of producer Mark Knopfler, among others, it is rejected for Infidels in 1983, only to be released on The Bootleg Series in 1991, and after The Band records it and enjoys success with it, Dylan surrenders: since 1997, fourteen years after its conception, Dylan has performed the song 227 times.
A reluctant capitulation, still. Dylan seems only half convinced, judging by his statements in the interview with Jonathan Lethem for Rolling Stone, 2006 (when he has performed the song already about a hundred times):
“It was never developed fully, I never got around to completing it. There wouldn’t have been any other reason for leaving it off the record.”
“It was never developed fully” also seems to be the key to explain the fate of “Red River Shore”. Presumably, the poet only gradually, around the seventh verse, recognised the beautiful ambiguity of traumatised killer or wandering soul, made a mental note, but never got around to completing it. And now the song is dead.
It needn’t be too late. Perhaps Dylan should consider a night on the town with the writer/director of The Sixth Sense. Storyteller M. Night Shyamalan is, after all, a guy who knows how to bring ’em on back to life.
To be continued. Next up: Red River Shore part 13: ’Twas in the merry month of June – finale.
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
The snake-like Lamia of ancient mythology, bewitched by the wife of Zeus, resurfaces as Lilith of biblical lore.
In the poem below, the alluring, but treacherous, shape-shifting night spirit is involved in a human relationship rather than with the crimson Beelzebub:
Her stately neck, and arms were bare
Her blue-veined feet unsandaled were
And wildly glittered here and there
The gems entangled in her hair
(Christabel: Samuel Coleridge)
In the following poem, sympathy is shown toward the beautified demon because of her desire to please the one she loves
She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue
Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue
Striped like a zebra, freakled like a pard
Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barred
(Lamia, part I: John Keats)
The Gothic Romantic bent of the poems above influences the rhythmic ballad song beneath that’s from more recent times:
I'll twine 'mid the ringlets of my raven black hair
The lilies so pale, and the roses so fair
The myrtles so bright with an emerald hue
And the pale aronatus with eyes of bright blue
(I'll Twine 'Mid The Ringlets: J.P. Webster et al)
In the next song appears the Lilith/Lamia figure again; she’s depicted as flawed – separated and alienated from the unitary gnostic Monad out there beyond the stars:
Your breath is sweet
Your eyes are like two jewels in the sky
Your back is straight, your hair is smooth
On the pillow where you lie
But I don't sense affection, no gratitude or love
Your loyalty is not to me, but to the stars above
(Bob Dylan: One More Cup Of Coffee)
Reversing the polarity of the optimistic sentiment expressed in the overwrought Romantic Transcendentalist poem quoted below:
Down by the merry brook
That runs through the vale
Where blossoms the roses
And the lilies so pale
Where the clover sweet-scented
Perfumes all the air
(I'm Waiting For Thee: 'Maud Irving')
The following bluegrass song might even be construed as a murder ballad; the Lilith/Lamia narrator therein looks forward to reaping her vengeance after her lover rejects her:
Oh, he taught me to love him, and call me his flower
That was blooming to cheer him through life's dreary hour
Oh, I long to see him, and regret the dark hour
He's gone, and neglected his pale wildwood flower
(Wildwood Flower: Carter Family)
Bob Dylan, with the Band, performs a short rendition of “Wildwood Flower”.
Here the whole concept of doing a study of some of the best cover versions of Dylan’s songs (which is the point of A Dylan Cover a Day in case you hadn’t noticed) falls apart. Because there is no definitive version of the song by Dylan with which we can compare it.
The best version we have is this one (it starts with some filming that is nothing to do with the song, so if you are of an impatient disposition, you might want to pop along to around the 25 second mark.
And if you care to follow the lyrics, they are below. They still sound to me as if they are improvised as Bob sings, but if that is the case how on earth did he manage to take it all the way to
And the old gypsy told her, like I said, “Carry on,”
I wish I was there to help her but I’m not there, I’m gone.
which is a masterpiece of an ending given all that was said before.
Anyway, I’ve rambled on about this utter masterpiece elsewhere on this site, and there’s not much I can add to that – except to note that this original by Dylan is far better than the cover version that turned up in the movie. Which is really the reverse of the whole point of this series – what I am normally trying to comment on are the covers that ADD something to Dylan. Nothing adds to Dylan in this case, although I’ve had a go myself out of desperation to give the world another version of this masterpiece.
We have published the lyrics before, and looking at them again I am correcting them here
Thing’s are all right and she’s all too tight
In my neighbourhood she cries both day and night
I know it because it was there
It’s a milestone but she’s down on her luck
And she’s daily salooning about to make a hard earned buck;
I was there.
I believe that she’d stop him if she would start to care
I believe that she’d look upon the side that used to care
And I’d go by the Lord anywhere she’s on my way
But I don’t belong there.
No, I don’t belong to her, I don’t belong to anybody
She’s my Christ-forsaken-angel but she don’t hear me cry
She’s a lone hearted mystic and she can’t carry on
When I’m there she’s all right, but then she’s not, when I’m gone.
Heaven knows that the answer she not calling no one
She’s the way, forsaken beauty for she’s mine, for the one
And I lost her hesitation by temptation lest it runs
But she don’t honour me but I’m not there, I’m gone.
Now I’ll cry tonight like I cried the night before
And I’m leased on the highway but I still dream about the door
It’s so long, she’s forsaken by her faith, (where’s to tell?)
It don’t have consternation she’s my all, fare thee well.
Now when I’ll teach that lady I was born to love her
But she knows that the kingdom waits so high above her
And I run but I race but it’s not too fast or still
But I don’t perceive her, I’m not there, I’m gone.
Well it’s all about diffusion and I cry for her veil
I don’t need anybody now beside me to tell
And it’s all affirmation I receive but it’s not
She’s a lone-hearted beauty
but she don’t like this spot and she’ gone.
Yeah, she’s gone like the radio, the shining yesterday
But now she’s home beside me and I’d like her here to stay
She’s a lone, forsaken beauty and I don’t trust anyone
And I wish I was beside her but I’m not there, I’m gone.
Well, it’s too hard to stay here and I don’t want to leave
It’s so bad, for so few see, but she’s a heart too hard to need
It’s alone, it’s a crime the way she hauls me around
But she don’t fall to hate me but tears are gone; a painted clown.
Yes, I believe that it’s rightful oh, I believe it in my mind
I’ve been told like I said one night before “Carry on the crying”
And the old gypsy told her, like I said, “Carry on,”
I wish I was there to help her but I’m not there, I’m gone.
This version I really like – I don’t know who this guy is, but full credit to him for taking this very difficult song on. He even gets the breathing right, and certainly holds my attention.
And one more. Ignore the date – that can’t be right. I don’t think the opening works, but it improves… do stay with it – after 40 seconds they get going. I wonder why the guys didn’t hear that this opening needs a much stronger solo male vocal if you are going to try it.
The instrumental verse however is perfect – brilliant thought out and executed even though the recording is a little rough.
Finally this is the version you’ll know from the soundtrack.
This is an utterly staggering song, and it deserves much more in terms of attention than these few versions. But then as ever these are just my opinions.
Last up: the interview with the producer director Todd Haynes discussing “I’m not there” and the issue of cover versions.
https://youtu.be/bR66am6F6IE
Here’s a list of most of the articles from this series…
Now I heard of a guy who lived a long time ago
A man full of sorrow and strife
That if someone around him died and was dead
He knew how to bring ’em on back to life
Well I don’t know what kind of language he used
Or if they do that kind of thing anymore
Sometimes I think nobody ever saw me here at all
Except the girl from the red river shore
Dylan also comes along for a moment. In “the Zone”, the border area where the soul resides for a while when you are enraptured on earth – by music, for example. And that, “the Zone”, is where Moonwind Stardancer’s ship sails; to the sounds of “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. Protagonist Joe roams around there, looking for Moonwind, because Moonwind knows how to bring him back to life. In Soul, the overpowering 2020 Pixar film, the soul of dying jazz pianist Joe Gardner can be brought back to life if he has a fully ticked off Earth Pass that grants him access to Earth, and thus back to his lifeless body. In The Great Before, the dimension where souls are prepared for Life, he must obtain one. A given used at about the same time by filmmaker Edson Oda for his thoroughly poetic film Nine Days (2020); in a lonely house on an unreal plain, the hermit selects, in nine-day interview sessions, the souls that are allowed to go to a body on Earth. The scenario is a Swiss cheese, but oh well; the images are pure poetry and the actors are sublimely cast.
Reanimation as a theme is of all times, but in most cases the plot leads to fright and horror, to sorrow and strife. The Flatliners who deliberately kill themselves and then reanimate each other do not exactly enjoy their regained, nightmarish lives (1990), and the life broker in the rip-off The Lazarus Effect (2017) also horribly regrets the monster he creates when he revives his own wrecked girl from the Red River shore, fiancée Zoë. She turns into an unstoppable killing machine with supernatural powers. And similar horror is provided by most reanimation stories and the dozens of Frankenstein films.
Only a handful of films have a positive twist like Soul. The Crow, although a gory revenge film, has a sort of happy ending for the revived Brandon Lee (whose actual death during the shooting is filmed, lugubriously, as a fake gun accidentally shoots a projectile into his stomach). And the cinematic monument RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987) is not quite a feel-good movie either, but the reanimated cop Alex Murphy is at least programmed to serve the public trust, protect the innocent, and uphold the law. And is inspired by the most famous reanimator of all time, the same one who also inspires Dylan;
“The point of RoboCop is, of course, it is a Christ story. It is about a guy that gets crucified after 50 minutes, then is resurrected in the next 50 minutes and then is like the super-cop of the world, but is also a Jesus figure as he walks over water at the end.”
(director Paul Verhoeven in MTV News, 2010)
The final couplet of “Red River Shore” is, without a doubt, the most fascinating one of the song. Every line is striking and the whole, like Dylan’s best final couplets, offers both a twist on the previous stanzas and a menu of possible scenarios.
The opening, I heard of a guy who lived a long time ago, masks through the choice of words (“a guy”) the identity of Jesus, who therefore all the more surprisingly three lines later turns out to be “the guy”. For the time being, the storyteller keeps the suspense going; the “guy” was a man full of sorrow and strife. Which pushes the associations, again through word choice, to medieval tragic heroes and ancient murder ballads. Identical word choice as in one of the many “Matty Groves” variants, for example. In the seventeenth century, troubadours sang about Matty (or rather: about Little Musgrave, as he was more often called in those days):
‘To lodge wi thee a’ night, fair lady,
Wad breed baith sorrow and strife;
For I see by the rings on your fingers
You’re good Lord Barnaby’s wife.’
… and to the nineteenth-century “Arthur McBride”, the song Dylan interprets so lovingly, seven years before “Red River Shore”, on Good As I Been To You (“And he pays all his debts without sorrow and strife”).
But on the other hand, it already has an evangelical connotation; “Sorrow and strife” does indeed have a New Testament colour, is a word combination that is otherwise only to be found in gospel music. In “Wait For Me” by The Statesmen for example, Brenda Lee’s “Some People”, and in old hymns like “Jesus, I Come” and “Out Of My Darkness Into Thy Light” – all edifying songs in which a longing for liberation from earthly sorrow and strife and for union with Jesus is sung. With the single use of those two words sorrow and strife, in short, the poet builds a bridge from the old-fashioned folk atmosphere of the previous seven stanzas to the introduction of the gospel in this finale. A bridge that becomes all the more solid with the following if someone around him died and was dead; again that Biblical tone, the tautological of John (“he who is of the earth is earthly and speaks of the earth,” 3:31), Esther (“and fast ye for me, and neither eat nor drink,” 4:16), Proverbs 14:24 (“the foolishness of fools is folly”), to name but three examples – the Bible is rich in tautologies like Dylan’s he died and was dead.
The road is paved. So, in this chapter 8, verse 4 we get to know who the guy is: the most famous reanimator of all time, that is. But still described with the same pleasantly disrespectful, folksy tone: He knew how to bring ’em on back to life. Undertones: boy, he was quite something, this guy Jesus. The same tone Dylan uses in “Highway 61 Revisited” in the dialogue of Abraham and God; man, you must be puttin’ me on.
Apart from that: the insinuation confirms the veiled hints from the previous verses; the narrator is looking for a guy who can bring the dead back to life – and thus insinuates that his girl from the Red River shore is dead. More than that, he reaffirms the vague suspicion that he himself is the murderer. After the cryptic opening in which he suggests that he has scared her to death in the dark, after which she has left for an area where the angels fly, and after the in this scenario rather lugubrious words she should always be with me, and all subsequent ambiguous outpourings, this is then relatively unambiguous – after “death” in the opening the narrator, neatly cyclic, returns in his closing words to the words dead, died and back to life. Words of a desperate, repentant sinner who needs a deus ex machina to undo auld lang syne, to dissolve the shadows of his past.
But: this is a Dylan song in the same category as “Desolation Row” and “Mississippi”, in the category of monumental songs that meander between lyricism and epicism, that insinuate more than they tell, that don’t show anything more than what the broken glass reflects. The poet has one final twist up his sleeve…
JOE
Does this mean I’m… dead?
COUNSELOR JERRY A
Not yet. Your body’s in a holding pattern. It’s complicated.
To be continued. Next up: Red River Shore part 12: I see dead people
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
A list of all the previous articles in this series is given at the end.
by Patrick Roefflaer
Released 1989-09-12
Graffiti Remerro Trotsky Williams
Photographer Suzie-Q
Art-director Christopher Austopchuck
Type Design Mark Burdett
Often, when a photo is needed for the cover of his next album, Bob Dylan invites a photographer to meet him at the recording studio where the sessions took place, usually during the mixing stage.
His 26 studio album, Oh Mercy, was famously recorded in New Orleans in the Spring of 1989. But when the record company asks for a photo, the singer is in New York City, where he is rehearsing for his imminent Summer tour.
Tour 89 starts in Europe, on May 27. There’s only a two-day break between the last show in Athens, Greece on June 28 and the start of the American leg in Peoria, Illinois, on July 1st. That tour ends on September 24.
A show is planned in New Orleans on August 25, but that’s too late to obtain a picture for the album. So, it’s time for a plan B.
The rehearsals take place in The Power Station in the Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood in Manhattan. Those recording facilities are located at 441 West 53rd Street. On the next corner – just a three-minute walk – is a Chinese Restaurant, Kowk Wah.
The entrance of the restaurant is on 9th Street, the wall facing West 53rd is graced with a colorful acrylic-on-brick mural, which charms Bob Dylan. The mural is signed: Trotsky ‘86.
Dylan has the work photographed. The photograph was taken by JIM LINDERMAN / DULL TOOL DIM BULB.
With the help of a local community group, representatives of Columbia Records locate the artist living just across the street of the mural. They find that his name is actually Trotksy: Remerro Trotsky Williams.
Williams was born (in February 1953) and raised in Washington DC. He had painted murals in his hometown, and on the West German side of the Berlin Wall before creating the ‘Dancing Couple’ mural.
In an interview with New York Magazine, published in September 1989, Trotsky recounted: “I had just come from the housing court, and I owed thousands of dollars in rent. I was just about to give up and move to Atlanta or Istanbul, and I get a phone call: ‘CBS calling – we want to use one of your paintings for the Bob Dylan LP’, and I say ‘You’re kidding me; this is some kind of cruel joke; go away, but give me your number and I’ll call you back.’ I called back and it ended up being a real thing.”
The artist is offered $5,000 for the use of his art on the next Bob Dylan album and he’s invited to meet the singer (probably on July 23 at the show at the Jones Beach Theatre, Wantagh, Long Island, NYC).
“He told me my painting blew him away,” says the artist in another late 1989 interview for People. “He was also concerned that I liked the title of the album to go with my artwork. That was very nice.”
”I’m hot right now and I love it,” Trostky concluded. However, a few months later he was diagnosed with HIV. Luckily he survived.
The mural itself self however didn’t survive. In 2011 it was replaced by two new pieces of wall art. Nowadays the place is a pizzeria, called Norma. The brick wall is painted brownish, without any artworks.
On the back of the cover is a photo of the singer with a hat, according to the credits taken by Suzie-Q. This probably refers to his clothing advisor, Suzie Pullen.
The overall design of the album is overseen by Christopher Austopchuck, graphic design professor at the School of Visual Arts. As Creative Director for CBS, he was responsible for the art works for three other Bob Dylan related albums: The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991 (1991), The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration (1992) and Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Vol. 3 (1994).
Type Design by Mark Burdett, another photographer & art director for CBS.
————-
This is a continuing series of articles with illustrations, concerning the origins of and decision making within, creating the covers of Bob Dylan’s albums.
Here are the articles so far . All are by Patrick Roefflaer.
In the Gnostic-like Book of Revelations of the New Testament, Satan is depicted as a red dragon with seven heads. In the Old Testament, as a smooth-talking serpent whereby humans end up mortal:
Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field
Which the Lord had made
(Genesis 3:1)
Whether by flies or by fires, death consumes us all – the biblical winged Baalzebub and red Satan symbolic thereof.
As in the Gospels of the Holy Bible, the recordings of the musical band known as ‘King Crimson’ merge the two demons – Beelzebub with Satan.
Inspired no doubt by the Blakean-tiger-pounching song lyrics below written by Bob Dylan:
Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rolling high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps
(Bob Dylan: My Back Pages)
In the New Testament of the Holy Bible, Jesus (who gets raised to God’s level in the Christian religion) is accused of being a follower of Satan, not of God:
And the scribes which came down from Jerusalem said
"He hath Beelzebub, and by the prince of the devils
Casteth he out devils"
(Mark 3:22)
To which Jesus, the Christian Messiah-to-be, replies:
" ...How can Satan cast out Satan?
And if a kingdom be divided against itself
That kingdom cannot stand"
(Mark 3: 23, 24 )
In a number of his songs, BeelzeBob Dylan tries to reconcile good (God) and evil (the Devil) both of whom the singer/songwriter takes as haunting the souls of us all; he attempts to marry Heaven and Hell [please click on the link after the four lines from the song to hear a cover version].
I been double-crossed now
For the very last time, and now I'm finally free
I kissed goodbye to the howling beast
On the borderline which separated you from me
(Bob Dylan: Idiot Wind)
However, Satan, the beastly side of the Almighty One, hangs around; isn’t that easy to get rid of:
I dreamt a monstrous dream
Something came up out of the sea
Swept through the land of the rich and the free
(Bob Dylan: 'Cross The Green Mountain)
There is a list of most of the earlier articles from this series at the end of the article.
By Tony Attwood
If this song has to be anything, it has to be fun. Which means a lilting beat and beautiful harmonies. Or delicate. Or beautiful. Or smooth. Or lilting… which explains why this is so successful a song. It can be what you make it.
Just let this track play and enjoy the perfection as well as the smoothness… It is by the Shaken Bakers, of whom I know next to nothing – if you know please fill in a comment and tell me more.
By way of contrast Dennis Bono turns the song into something utterly different. Dennis Bono, was noted as “the consummate interpreter of the Great American Songbook,” by the Chicago Tribune as “a thoroughbred singer, born and bred to sing.”
It doesn’t do much for me, but that’s just me. It’s the other end of the spectrum from the Shaken Bakers.
Many of the hundreds of recordings of this song are just obvious in what they do, relying on us knowing the song and accepting it as background music.
But some, like those above, make the effort, and in that category we must include Clare Teal and Her Mini Big Band. A really good middle eight, and a suitably understated use of the full band.
Just one more to show what people with musical imagination (as opposed to people who do the obvious) can actually do with a Dylan song. It’s not revolutionary, but it has its own beauty, and there are moments in life (if you are very lucky) when it applies. By the end, chances are, you are ready to fall asleep in her arms.
If you have been, thanks for reading.
Here’s a list of most of the articles from this series…
Well I went back to see about her once
Went back to straighten it out
Everybody that I talked to had seen us there
Said they didn’t know who I was talking about
Well the sun went down on me a long time ago
I’ve had to pull back from the door
I wish I could have spent every hour of my life
With the girl from the red river shore
Chancellor Merkel also plays along. In 2012, at a prize-giving ceremony, she happens to mention a recent visit to the town of Bielefeld, a small city in North Rhine-Westphalia. She drops a dramatically perfect pause and then adds: “… so es denn existiert – if it exists at all.” The audience laughs all the louder, as Frau Merkel very rarely allows herself to indulge in frivolities. When the laughter subsides, the Chancellor places, again perfectly timed: “Ich hatte den Eindruck, ich war da – I was under the impression that I was there.”
Merkel is referring to a running gag that by then has been popular in Germany for nearly 30 years: the collective conspiracy to maintain that Bielefeld does not exist at all. Its existence is said to have been fabricated by, as befits a good conspiracy theory, an unnamed “THEY” (“SIE” – always written in capitals).
The city council deals with it somewhat ambiguously. For the first few years, until 1999, the increasingly popular joke is ignored, but then the council decides on a counter-offensive and launches the Bielefeld gibt es doch! campaign (“Bielefeld does exist!”) with an official press release. Unfortunately, an inattentive official sends the official statement to the press on 1 April, so obviously, it backfires. In 2019, the next counter-offensive follows: the city council awards 1 million euros to the person who can prove conclusively that Bielefeld does not exist.
Usually, it is less funny, such a collective conspiracy. Which seems to be Dylan’s approach now; the less funny track. Apparently, the previous verse, the I know I’ve stayed here before verse, inspires him to the plot of an old-fashioned mystery thriller – the plot of a movie like The Lady Vanishes, to be more precise. Not too far-fetched; Hitchcock is on a pedestal with Dylan. In interviews, he does mention the director quite frequently, always admiringly, Hitchcock passes by once in Tarantula (“the world didn’t stop for a second – it just blew up / alfred hitchcock made the whole thing into a mystery”) and anyway: Dylan does have a fondness for old black and white crime thrillers in general.
In this old Hitchcock film (The Lady Vanishes is from 1938 and is considered one of Hitchcock’s “early sound films”), the plot revolves around a young woman who seems to be the only one to notice the disappearance of a fellow passenger on the train, the elderly lady Miss Froy. The other passengers and the train staff all claim they never saw her. Everybody that I talked to had seen us there said they didn’t know who I was talking about. A doctor present diagnoses hallucinations in poor, desperate Iris, and is not bothered by professional secrecy; he blabbers about it all over the train. An artifice that effectively contributes to the feeling of increasing suffocation for both the protagonist and the audience – in a more modern film (2005) with a similar plot, Flightplan with Jodie Foster, poor Jodie is even tied to her plane seat by supposedly well-meaning airline staff, and a therapist present there diagnoses something like hallucinations due to an unresolved trauma. Which, of course, exponentially increases the helpless frustration of the audience and Jodie. Especially since the missing lady in this film is Jodie’s six-year-old daughter – an extra traumatising dimension already added in Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965) and later, in a variant, in Clint Eastwood’s Changeling with Angelina Jolie.
There is a difference though, a psychological deepening in fact, with Dylan’s protagonist – in all these films, the unhappy protagonist has at least one powerful ally: the audience. We have all witnessed that Miss Froy really exists, that Jodie Foster is not crazy and that little Bunny Lake is not a figment of a mentally ill lady’s imagination either. In “Red River Shore”, however, the screenwriter has already sown doubts about the protagonist; the audience has already heard him say that his time with that girl was “a dream”, has heard him sigh that she was “true to me”, and we even have some reason to suspect that the protagonist is a traumatised murderer – with all those whole and half references to a fatal event in the shadows of the past.
The build-up is good. “I went back to see about her once, went back to straighten it out” is an announcement that already makes the audience cringe: “Don’t do it, man.” The subsequent observation that everyone denies knowing her, all those people that had seen us there together back then, is then even a bit of a relief; thankfully, the whole village conspires to keep this dubious figure away from her. We, the audience, even become accomplices in a way; unlike in all those paranoia films, we are not on the side of the victim of the conspiracy, but we have sympathy for the conspirators.
It seems to break the I-person. “The sun went down on me a long time ago / I’ve had to pull back from the door” – Dylan’s paraphrase of the poetic resignation from a recent pop song beyond categorization, from Elton John’s 1974 “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me”. The brilliant song, which superficially expresses a long jeremiad of a spurned lover, but with, as lyricist Bernie Taupin says, “a dark twist”;
But you misread my meaning when I met you
Closed the door and left me blinded by the light
Don't let the sun go down on me
Although I search myself, it's always someone else I see
I'd just allow a fragment of your life to wander free
But losing everything is like the sun going down on me
An hors catégorie song that achieves a Holy Trinity: majestic lyrics with a dark twist, delightful melodies and a brilliant, just not over-the-top from babbling-mountain-brook-to-wilderness waterfall arrangement. Thanks to the chilling elegance of Davey Johnstone’s guitar, Del Newman’s superior horn arrangement and the heavenly backing vocals of the Beach Boys Carl Wilson and Bruce Johnston (and Toni Tennille of Captain & Tenille).
Elton, too, had an opinion, by the way:
“I’m not always the best judge of my own work – I am, after all, the man who loudly announced that ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’ was such a terrible song that I would never countenance releasing it […]. I hated the song so much we were going to stop recording it immediately and send it to Engelbert Humperdinck – ‘and if he doesn’t want it, tell him to send it to Lulu! She can put it on a B-side!’ – I was coaxed back to the vocal booth and completed the take. Then I yelled at Gus Dudgeon that I hated it even more now it was finished and was going to kill him with my bare hands if he put it on the album.”
(Me – Elton John, 2019)
Which, in retrospect, makes us regret that Gus Dudgeon was not the producer in Miami in January 1997. To coax Dylan back and complete the song.
To be continued. Next up: Red River Shore part 11: It’s complicated
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
While we have considered Dylan’s jazzy tendencies, his roots in folk music, and we have noticed how he leans towards country and blues, that is both urban and country blues, it is rock music that is core to Dylan’s musical project. Dylan is a rocker – the last of the best, as he boasts in ‘False Prophet.’
From the moment he got on stage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with a hastily improvised group of musicians from The Paul Butterfield Blues Band and belted out a rough and rowdy ‘Maggie’s Farm’ Dylan was all about rock music. Not folk rock (like Simon and Garfunkel) or soft rock (like The Eagles) but hard rock, solid rock.
Rock music is harder to define than it is to identify. Google describes it as, ‘a form of popular music that evolved from rock and roll and pop music during the mid and late 1960s. Harsher and often self-consciously more serious than its predecessors, it was initially characterized by musical experimentation and drug-related or anti-establishment lyrics.’ It is also described simply as ‘a form of music with a strong beat.’
In his early acoustic, pre-rock period, Dylan liked to start his shows with ‘The Time They Are A’Changing,’ a declaration of form as much as the ‘protest’ content of those early songs. By the time we get to the period we’re looking at now, 2003 – 2005, the folky Dylan has almost entirely vanished, and his favourite concert openers were ‘Maggie’s Farm’ or ‘Drifter’s Escape,’ both blistering rockers.
As it moved further away from its 1950’s roots in rock ‘n roll, rock music became more and more sophisticated. By the time we get to the end of the 1960s the great rock bands, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, were making albums like Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Their Satanic Majesties Request in which rock music, having moved away from its blues and rock ‘n roll roots, had become complex, elaborate, Baroque and at times over-inflated. King Crimson’s Court of the Crimson King took rock music to new levels of orchestration and portentousness.
Despite the sophistication of his lyrics, Dylan never went there. As a rocker, he remained true to the music’s ‘primitive’ roots. As a singer he was more drawn to the blues shouters like Sonny Boy Williamson and Big Joe Turner than the gauzy harmonies of King Crimson or the sweet melodious tones of Simon and Garfunkel.
So let’s turn to that prototype of Dylan rock songs, ‘Maggie’s Farm’ the first song that clearly marked him as a rock singer. Here’s how he kicks off the Rochester concert. He’s taken some of the jangle out of it and turned the song into a smooth, somewhat minimal, hard-hitting rock song, with all the emphasis on the compelling beat. The drums and bass sure move it along. Dylan feels entirely comfortable with this one. He rarely plays harmonica on this song, although it feels like the song’s made for it, or at least that’s the way Dylan makes it sound here:
Maggie’s farm
Listening to that, I have to wonder how we ever thought this song was not a protest song. Maggie’s dysfunctional farm is Dylan’s America, the stultifying 1950s by the sound of it. It is satire by absurdity.
A straight-out blues-rocker, ‘Down Along The Cove,’ was also a favourite to kick off a concert or played early. Dylan feels comfortable with this one too. He’s adding new verses. Whether he’s making them up on the spot, which is what it sounds like, or not I wouldn’t know, but it gives the performance an off-the-cuff, improvised feel. A great foot-tapper, mood setter this one. There’s a joyousness in it, a simple unaffected feeling. You see your true love coming your way!
Dylan kicks off the Manchester concert with this one. (11th June)
Down Along the Cove
‘Watching the River Flow’ is another bluesy rocker that Dylan likes bring out early in the concerts. It has a relaxed and easy beat to swing along to. It’s a good one to follow a slow song. Dylan does a remarkable vocal here, slurring his voice, making it sound as if he’s too weary to even catch the beat – but of course he does, appearing to just catch the line in time. That vocal, plus an insistent harp break at the end, makes this one compulsive listening.
Watching the river flow
‘Wicked Messenger’ that obscure little ballad from John Wesley Harding has turned into a real slammer, full-frontal assault. If it doesn’t wake you up, nothing will. We have seen some outstanding performances of this song over the last four or five years. This recording from Plougskeepsie (NY) 4th August, where it is the opening number, is not as good as some we have had, but fans of the song will be glad to know that it’s as wicked as ever.
Wicked Messenger
Now for a change of pace. ‘Can’t Wait,’ is a dark and desperate rocker from Time Out of Mind, and early performances of the song pretty much stuck with the album arrangement. In 2003, however, we saw Dylan transform the song into a quiet, almost sinister, prowling rocker. This 2004 performance keeps that arrangement, and what a powerful performance it is, outdoing the 2003 version in my opinion, as good as the earlier one was (See NET, 2003, Part 1). This has all the prowling energy of a caged tiger. It’s a restrained performance, but like a coiled spring. A powerful vocal pushes at the edges of that restraint. It doesn’t have to be loud to be explosive. [I don’t have the date for this one. It is from a compilation called Gone to the Finest Schools, for which I have lost the paperwork. Apologies.] It comes in at number eight on the setlist.
Can’t Wait
What better song to stir things up after that but ‘Highway 61 Revisited.’ Like Maggie’s Farm it rips a hole in the American dream. Death, deception and war; it’s all there. I’m glad Dylan’s never tried to slow this one down. Over the years it hasn’t changed much, hardly at all. It still rushes along at full gallop. It comes in at number 10 on the Manchester setlist.
Highway 61 Revisited
In Part 1 of this year, I included ‘Lovesick,’ that song of twilight shadows. I have to include it here again, I’m afraid, as I’ve since discovered a performance in which Dylan plays the harmonica, rare for this song. To my ear the harmonica is under-recorded, but it’s Dylan in his old form, playing those high, wild, mercurial notes he loves so much. It adds a certain desperate edge to the song. It’s lurching, emphatic beat makes it a rock song, just slowed down. [Another from Gone to the Finest Schools, slot 7 on the setlist]
Lovesick
We can’t get too deep into any imagined concert without encountering ‘High Water.’ This one, a vision of ecological and moral mayhem, has a country rock feel, especially when the banjo comes in, but with that heavy back beat and those rock chords, the song is more rock than country. This one comes in at number 9 at Rochester. Dylan belts it out, a compelling performance.
High Water
Many of Dylan songs have the sense of a journey in them, a journey through a dystopic vision of modern America. Remember ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,’ a comic, madcap pilgrimage through modern American life. ‘Stuck Inside Of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again’ is a song like that, out of the same bag. It’s just that the terms have changed, and the vision is darker. You might get the Memphis Blues when you’re coming down off an amphetamine trip and the world begins to look twisted and strange, and you’re trapped in repetitive cycles. I don’t know if post-album performances of the song have quite captured its ambience (Blonde on Blonde) but this Rochester performance is as good as you’re going to get in 2004. It’s certainly raw and real enough.
Memphis Blues Again
‘Lonesome Day Blues’ is a classic urban rock blues. Dylan received some criticism for writing generic, ‘derivative’ songs like this, but that’s what the blues are. There is a familiarity to the best of these urban blues songs. You feel like you might have heard them before somewhere. Did Paul Butterfield play that? No, he didn’t. It might sound like it was written in 1948 for Sonny Boy Williamson, but it was actually written in 2001 for “Love and Theft”. The complaints in such a blues are similarly generic and derivative. That’s what makes such songs what they are. They have the force of familiarity about them. This was number 4 on the Rochester setlist.
Last night the wind was whispering,
I was trying to make out what it was
Last night the wind was whispering something,
I was trying to make out what it was
Yeah I tell myself something's coming, but it never does
Lonesome Day Blues
‘Honest with Me’ is another generic, derivative sounding song, although the tempo is faster and the lyrics more edgy. Elements of the absurd are woven in. It’s highly repetitive and relies on its wide-ranging lyrics to keep its interest. This is number 13 on the Rochester setlist
Well, my parents, they warned me not to risk my years
And I still got their advice oozing out of my ears
Honest with Me
‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ is one of Dylan’s greatest mid-1960s rock songs. It has a queasy, swaying motion in keeping with its tripped-out lyrics. During the 1966 tours Dylan would play the piano, but that didn’t stop it from being a heavy number. The album version had a spooky feel Dylan didn’t aim for on stage, at least not at this point (later he will try an echo for this song, to give it that feel). This is a solid performance, with Dylan starting to play harmonica more often on this song. This is number eight on the Glasgow setlist.
Ballad of a Thin Man
I’ve run out of space, but before the inevitable ‘All Along the Watchtower,’ always the last song, I don’t want to miss this ‘Senor’ (date unknown). This is a classic performance of another slow and heavy rock song. Slow and heavy yet oddly uplifting. For me the song is about putting an end to what, in False Prophet’ Dylan calls ‘the unlived meaningless life.’ We can overturn the tables of the money lenders, and maybe find salvation. Because of the epic harp solo at the end, reminiscent of the 2003 version, this performance really belonged with the songs in Never Ending Tour, 2004, part 3, Harping On but I’m happy to fit it in here.
Senor
And, as promised, the inevitable ‘Watchtower,’ always the last song on the setlist, or used as the last encore.
This first one’s number 17 on the Rochester setlist. Dark and threatening and slower than usual. Almost quiet during the verses. Note the echo on Dylan’s voice.
Watchtower (A)
This second one is from Glasgow, and is no less of a blast.
Christian theologians and artists tend to simplify the rather complicated ancient depiction of the cosomological order – Beelzebub, for instance, becomes equated with Satan, who rebels against the Almighty; or, at least, he’s Satan’s spokesman or ‘captain’. Either way, Beelzebub is implicated in causing humans to become mortal.
Nonetheless, the mixed-up confusion does not end. According to some latter-day Gnostics, Beelzebub hooks up with Lilith after she flees from Adam because of his domination over her when she’s his first mate; Lilith is therefore exiled as a ‘screech owl” to some God-forsaken place.
A burlesque perhaps, but with reference to:
There shall the great owl make her nest
And lay, and hatch, and gather under her shadow
There shall the vultures also be gathered
Everyone with his mate
(Isaiah 34: 15)
Beelzebub and Lilith are crowned the King and Queen of Hell-on-Earth.
In the song lyrics below, rather Baroque in tone, their disorderly conduct is countered by the King and Queen of Swords, depicted on Tarot cards, who strive to restore some semblance of an Edenic order where the coming on of death is made a bit more peaceful; yet death still triumphs:
Peace will come
With tranquility and splendour on the wheels of fire
But will bring us no reward when the false idols fall
And cruel death surrenders with its pale ghost retreating
Between the King and Queen of Swords
(Bob Dylan: Changing Of The Guards)
Jochen Markhorst, analyzing the song lyrics above, dismisses any attempt to find coherent meaning therein; the words are just there for the way they sound; they’re empty vessels that have no meaning – they have no life of their own.
Beelzebub will surely see to it that such Dylanologists are not cremated “on wheels of fire”, but buried alive – as occurs in a number of stories by Edgar Allan Poe…. Well, maybe not.
In any event, the singer/songwriter/musician below can’ t help
mixing-up the message – you’re going to have to serve somebody; it may be beastly Beelzebub who supposedly has a big one; it may be the Lord, or it may be Jesus.
You’re really never sure which one. After all, it had to be the Almighty One who creates Satan, the Great Deceiver:
He’s a great humanitarian, he’s a great philanthropist
He knows how to touch you, honey, and how you like
to be kissed
He'll put both his arms around you
You can feel the tender touch of the beast
You know sometimes Satan will come as a man of peace
(Bob Dylan: Man Of Peace)
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Unless this is the first “Cover A Day” you’ve read, you may have got the hang of what I am looking for in this series: people who are able to find something extra or at least different in the Dylan song they are covering. Something which takes Dylan’s original thoughts and finds a new place to send them. Something perhaps which through the musical arrangements gives a new edge – maybe even a new meaning – to the music.
This doesn’t mean I think all these covers are better than the originals, but rather that they give me a chance to return to songs that I know by heart and can play in my head, if the mood so takes me.
And I spell that out here because that is exactly what this version of “If you see her” does
Peter Viskinde was a major force in Danish rock music who died last year; I’m really pleased to have a chance to feature one of his performances. To me, he really gets hold of the song and find levels in it which Dylan chose not to exploit in his recording. Here we have the anger expressed which so often comes years after a relationship has broken down.
And in the arrangement he gets that heart-piercing gut-wrenching final section perfectly:
Sundown, yellow moon
I replay the past
I know every scene by heart
They all went by so fast
If she's passin' back this way
I'm not that hard to find
Tell her she can look me up
If she's got the time
“If she’s got the time” is a real killer of a final line for this song which has earlier had the lines
And though our separation
It pierced me to the heart
She still lives inside of me
We've never been apart
The singer is so screwed by the end of the relationship that “if she’s got the time” is just one of those amazing Dylan lines that looks so simple but carries with it depths of emotion that reach down to the core of the earth itself.
Sfuzzi (who once produced an album of Transylvanian Surf Music – a notion that gets my vote for the most unlikely genre of all time) go a totally different way, even changing the chord sequence to take out the blues feeling Dylan introduces with the flattened 7th. So “go from town to town” is just another line rather than having that blues edge that Dylan gives us.
But it is so pop all the way through it catches me out – rather than the music adding to the feelings of despair it contradicts those feelings in a strange, but effective way. If you can, do play this all the way through, because the ending will come as a bit of a surprise too.
Jeff Buckley produced one of the oddest re-workings of a Dylan song ever with “If you see her”. It’s not just that he really does take the song to another planet, it is that this recording gives us a minute and a half of attempts to tune his guitar. If you are short of time head for about 3 minutes 30 seconds by which time he’s got the hang of where he is going. By 6 minutes 21 seconds, with “Sundown, yellow moon” I think we’ve got what he was really after.
Moving on, if you are a regular reader of these ramblings you will not be surprised to find Mary Lee’s Corvette turning up. After all, their third album was indeed, Blood on the Tracks.
This is a version where “still gives me a chill” really does send my nerves a-tingling. I am not sure the contrasts in the low and high range of Mary Lee Kortes’ voice in the recording is the best use of her talent but it’s an interesting idea.
My final offering is one that changes the sex of who is being sung about – which of course we are prepared for by the fact that it’s from the Stonewall Celebration Concert. It’s great to hear the song performed by a man with a sublime singing voice, who can use its range of pitch and phraseology to perfection within what is quite a limited song musically.
It is really worth a listen.
If you have been, thanks for reading.
Here’s a list of most of the articles from this series…
Well I’m a stranger here in a strange land
But I know this is where I belong
I’ll ramble and gamble for the one I love
And the hills will give me a song
Though nothing looks familiar to me
I know I’ve stayed here before
Once a thousand nights ago
With the girl from the red river shore
It’s a diesel, Dylan’s lyrical engine. Today, anyway. It starts slowly and sputters, but is now almost at its optimum. After that wonderful opening full of alienation and melancholy, the engine sputters again, just for a second, and reluctantly produces one last filler. The unreal, dreamy atmosphere that the song poet evokes with the Kafkaesque I’m a stranger here in a strange land but I know this is where I belong evaporates at once with the introduction of a clichéd, earthy Rambling, Gambling Willie, the knave who indeed rambled and gambled for the ones he loved (“He supported all his children and all their mothers too”). A colourful protagonist, and a wonderful song – but a total miscast here.
Equally out of place is the meaningless, unrelated And the hills will give me a song. It’s possible that the faltering engine seeks a shortcut via Bing Crosby (“The Singing Hills”, 1940), or sputters past Rex Allen’s “Song Of The Hills” from 1949. And if Dylan has a hidden drawer somewhere in which he keeps the ignored phenomenon of Kevin Coyne, we may owe the musical hills to one of his hidden treasures, to “Shangri-La” from 1976 (when the later Police star Andy Summers is still in Coyne’s band, demonstrating his crushing talent);
Shangri-La is a million miles away
You might see it on a clear blue day
Over the hills and far away
They're singing out:
Duh-de-doo-doo, duh-de-doo-doo
… who knows. After all, “Million Miles” also features in these same recording sessions for Time Out Of Mind, and our protagonist is also on a hopeless quest for unattainable happiness. Unlikely, though. Singing hills probably impose themselves on the poet Dylan the way the image will impose itself on almost every listener: via one of the corniest highs (or lows, depending on personal taste) of the twentieth century:
The hills are alive with the sound of music
With songs they have sung for a thousand years
The hills fill my heart with the sound of music
My heart wants to sing every song it hears
… the song with which Julie Andrews introduces the Unbearable Lightness of her Being in The Sound Of Music, an association that at the most a minority of Dylan’s generation, and of the generation before that, and of the generation after that, will escape. And an association that, like Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie, quite seriously clashes with the mood and the setting that the songwriter in “Red River Shore” seems to want to evoke; the rather uncomfortable, Kafkaesque uncanniness. In Kafka’s words:
“To describe reality in a realistic way, but at the same time as a “floating nothing”, as a clear, lucid dream, so as a realistically perceived irreality.”
(the so-called “Petřín Hill Experience”, in his Reflections From The Year 1920)
… the mood that Dylan, fortunately, rediscovers after this little dip.
Though nothing looks familiar to me I know I’ve stayed here before is an oppressive outpouring from the protagonist. More sinister and less innocent, and even more unreal than a déjà vu – a déjà venu, as it were. It is a plot that is effectively used in mindfuck films such as Total Recall and Before I Go to Sleep, to evoke in the audience the same frightening feeling as in the protagonist, who usually has undergone something like a memory reset or implanted memories. Or, in the more criminal variety, the stories that suck us into the maddening frustration of victims of gaslighting; offices are dismantled, photos are swapped, walls are painted over, and when the protagonist returns with the police, the evidence is gone and everything is different. Though nothing looks familiar to me I know I’ve stayed here before – it’s the paranoid version of the musical highlight from The Muppets Movie (1979), from Gonzo’s heartbreaking “I’m Going To Go Back There Someday”;
This looks familiar
Vaguely familiar
Almost unreal yet
It's too soon to feel yet
Close to my soul
And yet so far away
I'm going to go back there
Someday
It really does seem that the song poet Dylan has found the tone again now. The following once a thousand nights ago is not such a hollow cliché as, say, “ramblin’ and gamblin’” or “when it’s all been said and done”, but has the same magical, poetic sheen as cloak of misery and fires of time; the paradoxical quality of being simultaneously fresh and old-fashioned. Its magical sheen can surely be traced back to Sheherazade, the Persian storyteller of the tales from One Thousand and One Nights, and is perhaps unintentionally reinforced by choosing not something like “once a long, long time ago” but rather “once a thousand nights ago”.
The poetic power, then, is due to a kind of generally accepted metaphorical quality of “thousand”; although thousand nights covers a relatively manageable span of time (not much more than two and a half years, in fact), we all experience it as “endlessly long”, “half a lifetime”. Like Emmylou Harris uses it in her moving ode to Gram Parsons from 1985, “Sweetheart Of The Rodeo”, in the beautiful opening line A thousand nights a thousand towns I took the bows, eventually leading to the equally beautiful closing couplet
I stepped into the light you left behind
I stood there where all the world could see me shine
Oh I was on my way to you to make you mine
But I took the longest road that I could find
Or as it is used in “I’ve Made Love To You A Thousand Times” by Smokey Robinson, the man whose poetic value was once equated by Dylan with Rimbaud and Allen Ginsberg (jokingly, we may assume, in an interview with the Chicago Daily News in 1965). And like this, there are a few more songs in which thousand nights, usually in a romantic context, is used as a metaphor for “unbearably long time” – but except for Sinatra’s “How Old Am I?” no songs from the canon – it’s not too common. “Thousand nights” is a realistically perceived irreality, so to speak.
To be continued. Next up: Red River Shore part 10: Send it to Lulu
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
I had an interesting email from Filip Łobodziński, who as I am sure you will recall if you are a regular reader of Untold, contributes to our site occasionally from Poland.
The article was written in 2017, and begins… ” “Bob Dylan! One more pride of Odessa,” reads the large billboard standing in front of City Hall in the Black Sea port city of Odessa. It is painted, with a famous image of the bard in one of his iconic pork pie hats.”
You may also recall that Filip has contributed articles and recordings from his band Dylan.pl and indeed a while back we were able to feature one of the band’s live concerts on the site.
On this occasion however Filip then went on to write to me about Martyna Jakubowicz, a Polish folk-blues-rock singer, who “has been singing Dylan songs for years… She released two albums full of covers in the 2000s.
“The translations are by her ex-husband (with whom she collaborates on a regular basis, Andrzej Jakubowicz lives in Florida, I think, but keeps in touch with his ex).
“I find this cover particularly captivating because of the porch rocking bench sound as a rhythm track.”
Now, I think this is an amazing cover – and it does exactly what I want cover versions to do. It thinks about what is in the song, and then avoids all notions of just copying what the composer / performer did, but sees where else and how much further this can go further.
The sound effect that Filip mentions – of the rocking chair on the porch – at the start which continues as the only accompaniment to the opening verse is incredibly disturbing, and thus immensley powerful. And I guess what I was expecting was the introduction of a second sound or an accompanying instrument for the second verse – but no, we are into the full accompaniment. It’s always good to be a) taken by surprise and b) have a surprise that retains the artistic integrity of the music.
This really is disturbing, and that is exactly what this song ought to be. And indeed this is the problem with Dylan’s heritage. We know so much of it so well that songs that were once disturbing now fail to disturb. That’s not Dylan’s fault – it is just familiarity playing its tricks. But familiarity can be beaten, as this track shows.
This recording indeed keeps me transfixed even though I don’t understand a word of the language, and the verses without the accompaniment add to that – especially the final verse where that disturbing sound returns. They are all dead, the rocking chair continues to be rocked by the wind, with no one else there. How long did it take before the bodies were found? Did anyone mourn them? Did someone have the decency to pay for a proper funeral?
For me, this is the heritage of Dylan’s work that I want. To know the originals inside out so I don’t have to play them because I can run them in my head, but then to be disturbed or at least knocked out of that “I know this song” approach with recordings like this.
Filip, I’m deeply indebted to you. How you and your country are coping with over two million refugees now within your borders I cannot imagine.
Jesus, says, in an ironic tone to his accusers, that it’s with the help of Almighty God that the evil influence of demons can be removed from one’s body; not with the aid of the Gnostic Beelzebub, the prince of darkness (Satan, as construed by many Christian authorities), because he does not have the spiritual strength, doesn’t possess the brightness, to do it:
"And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils
By whom do your sons cast them out? ...
He that is not with me is against me
And he that gathereth not with me scattereth"
(Luke11:19, 23)
The narrator in the song lyrics beneath takes the side of Jesus:
Jesus said, "Be ready
For you know not the hour which I come"
Jesus said, "Be ready
He said, "He who is not for Me is against Me"
Just so you know where He's coming from
(Bob Dylan: Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking)
Apparently, the problem is that there be those who claim to support Jesus and the Almighty, but behave as though they’re actually on the side of Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies:
You hurt the ones that I love best
And cover up the truth with lies
One day you'll be in the ditch
Flies buzzing around your eyes
Blood on your saddle
(Bob Dylan: Idiot Wind)
Happy little children, Diana and Apollo their names could be, greet King Crimson when he wings off to a Late Baroque/ Rococo light-scattered Fairy Land in the song lyrics below – a place to which Bob Dylan seldom travels:
Sailing on the wind
In a milk white gown
Dropping circle stones on a sun dial
Playing hide and seek
With the ghosts of dawn
Waiting for a smile from a sun child
(King Crimson: Moonchild)
The ‘yellow jester”, sometimes imagines himself in a rather Rococoesque fairy place where the reddish-purple Beelzebub of autumn appears to be in control:
The clouds are turning crimson
The leaves fall from the limbs and
The branches cast their shadows over stone
Won't you meet me in the moonlight all alone
(Bob Dylan: Moonlight)
Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published once or twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk.
We also have a Facebook site with over 14,000 members.
Well I’m a stranger here in a strange land
But I know this is where I belong
According to legend, Sean Lennon, John and Yoko’s son, triggered the song. In 1989, Sean visits Billy Joel in the studio, they got talking and Sean complains about the misery of our time, AIDS and wars and crises, and how hard it is to be 21 in this day and age. Ah yes, says Joel, we felt the same when we were 21. “Yeah, but at least when you were a kid,” counters Sean, “you grew up in the fifties, when nothing happened.” Do you really believe that, asks the Piano Man in surprise. Korean War, the Hungarian Uprising, the Little Rock Nine… a lot of stuff happened. I don’t know anything about it, Sean answers. I have to write about this, Joel thinks, I have to explain to Sean’s generation that this kind of epic struggle is of all times.
“The chain of news events and personalities came easily—mostly they just spilled out of my memory as fast as I could scribble them down,” says Billy. “I had a chord progression that originally belonged to a country song I was trying to write, and I sandwiched the words into those chords—‘Harry Truman, Doris Day,’ okay, so far so good—but then I didn’t know what to call the song, and therefore what words to use in the chorus.”
Something with “fire”, anyway. Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner drops by the studio these same days and disapproves of both Dancing Through the Fire (“that sucks”) and Waltzing Through The Fire. In the end, Jann thinks “We Didn’t Start The Fire” is cool. The lyrics are a recapitulation of 118 events, loaded names, controversial films and influential books, interspersed with the now-familiar chorus, and it becomes a No. 1 hit. Not really one of Joel’s great masterpieces, but at least more sincere and exciting than the bland “The Fires Of Time” by The Bellamy Brothers.
Looking back, Billy Joel himself is not too proud of the song either;
“Even I realized I hated the melody. It was horrendous, as I said at the time; it was like a droning mosquito. What does the song really mean? Is it an apologia for the baby boomers? No, it’s not. It’s just a song that says the world’s a mess. It’s always been a mess, it’s always going to be a mess.”
(Fred Schruers – Billy Joel. The Definitive Biography, 2014)
Still, the song has a value. The Scholastic Weekly uses the lyrics as a teaching aid, and indeed, Sean Lennon’s generation now does see the 1950s a bit more nuanced, with less rose-tinted glasses.
And just like in “The Fires Of Time”, Dylan comes along in “We Didn’t Start The Fire” as a historical landmark;
Hemingway, Eichmann, "Stranger in a Strange Land"
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion
"Lawrence of Arabia", British Beatlemania
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson
Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex
JFK – blown away, what else do I have to say?
… when Joel, in his – almost chronological – enumeration, has arrived at the 1960s. Between Hemingway’s suicide, the Eichmann trial, the construction of the Berlin Wall and the Bay of Pigs Invasion – so we are in 1961, the year Dylan scored his record deal. And the year in which the infamous “Stranger In A Strange Land” was published, the overwhelming socio- critical science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein. Bowie didn’t like it (“It was a staggeringly, awesomely trite book”), but the novel is on the bookshelf of the front fighters from the sixties scenes, as David McGowan shows in his wonderful book Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon (2020). Zappa is a fan, as are Gene Clark, Grace Slick, Charles Manson, Jim Morrison and David Crosby, to name but a few. Heinlein himself lives in Laurel Canyon (at 8775 Lookout Mountain Avenue) during those years, and not only his book, but he, personally, too lingers at the crossroads of revolution, hippie rock, avant garde and Hollywood.
It seems that Dylan is thinking of Heinlein’s protagonist Valentine Michael Smith when he opens the sixth verse of his “Red River Shore” with the overused expression stranger in a strange land. The phrase itself, of course, has been around for 27 centuries or so (already spoken by Moses in Exodus 2:22, “And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land”, and Moses probably didn’t get it from himself either), and is almost always used as Moses intended: to express displacement, literal non-home-ness and consequent discomfort. The feeling that even Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula fears (“But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one”), the feeling that Mark Twain’s Chinese alter ego Ah Song Hi incorporates into a letter home with words that we also hear in Dylan’s “I Was Young When I Left Home”: “I was to begin life a stranger in a strange land, without a friend, or a penny, or any clothes but those I had on my back” (Not a shirt on my back, not a penny on my name, sings He-who-never-wrote-a-letter-to-his-home in Dylan’s song). Madonna (“Wash All Over Me”), Herman Melville, Pete Townshend, U2, journalists, Robbie Robertson (in the beautiful, atmospheric Lanois production “Somewhere Down The Crazy River”), Albert Camus and Sophocles… the expression is used gladly and often in all times in all corners of the cultural spectrum – and always to express that something or someone does not belong here.
But Heinlein’s protagonist in Stranger In A Strange Land, Michael Smith, is a stranger who, as Dylan says, knows that this is where he belongs, here, on Earth. Michael is born aboard a spaceship on its way to Mars. The landing fails fatally and baby Michael is the only survivor. Raised by Martians, he is discovered twenty-five years later by a next, this time successful, Mars expedition and taken back to Earth. He belongs here – but remains an alien. About the situation Mowgli finds himself in when he goes to the village, how Tarzan feels like Lord Greystoke, the state of mind of the civilised savage John in Brave New World and of the surveyor K. in Kafka’s The Castle: “But I know this is where I belong”.
It is a beautiful, both poetic and Kafkaesque situation sketch, stranger here in a strange land, but I know this is where I belong. Uncanny and frustrating, meaningless and indeterminate; it is the existentialist version of an unrequited love – like the love for a girl from the Red River shore.
To be continued. Next up: Red River Shore part 9: A floating nothing
———
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
Untold Dylan was created in 2008 and is currently published once or twice a day – sometimes more, sometimes less. Details of some of our series are given at the top of the page and in the Recent Posts list, which appears both on the right side of the page and at the very foot of the page (helpful if you are reading on a phone). Some of our past articles which form part of a series are also included on the home page.
Articles are written by a variety of volunteers and you can read more about them here If you would like to write for Untold Dylan, do email with your idea or article to Tony@schools.co.uk.
We also have a Facebook site with over 14,000 members.
There are some Dylan songs that I really think ought to be covered by other artists, but which no one seems to want to try. “If you ever go to Houston” is one such. Listening to it today, I can just hear what I would want to try if I were a) a lot younger and b) still playing in a band. Indeed I think after finishing this little piece I might pop downstairs and see what I can do on the piano.
So I moved on to “If you gotta go” but before I get to that, I would add that while looking just to see if anyone had had a bash at Houston, I did discover this from Don Gibson recorded in 1976. The song has nothing to do with Bob’s composition, but I wonder if Bob overtly or subliminally took his title from there.
Mind you, “Midnight special” also has the line “If you ever go to Houston” so maybe that was the source. Bob was certainly there having been invited to play harmonica on the original recording of that song with Harry Belafonte. Here’s one of the run-through takes with Bob…
All of which finally brings me on to “If you gotta go go now”.
The first-ever cover version was by The Liverpool Five.
Despite their silly name (well, I think it is silly, but then I’m a Londoner, so I would do) they were one of those warm-up bands that seemed to turn up all over the place playing at concerts of The Lovin’ Spoonful, Stevie Wonder, The Kinks and The Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, The Righteous Brothers and The Byrds. And probably a lot more.
As for the music – for me, it’s too much of a plod which takes all the fun out of the song.
The next one is also not to my taste but my goodness it really made me smile…
Oh that plinky guitar in between verses!
One of the funny things about this song is that it seems to inspire people to do all sorts of funny things with it – if you see what I mean. Just listen…
Somewhat better, because the singer understands what the words are about, is the Cowboy Junkies version. The only problem is the band are seemingly fighting with each other to be part of the overall sound. Didn’t they have producers in those days?
But there is always someone with some musical intelligence who can apply him or herself to making more out of the composition. And finally, I found one (and you should hear some of the covers that didn’t make it to this edition, some of them really are pretty lacking in understanding of what music is actually about.)
And yes I would say this version has been worth waiting for.
Tony Skeggs is a Cavern Club performer and there’s a little bit about him through that link.
But I must include the Fairport Convention version, just because it is so silly and funny and just whacky. And I always love whacky.
Here’s a list of most of the articles from this series…
When I came to the end of Part 2 of my survey of 2004, which I entitled ‘The Jazz Connection,’ I thought I had done a pretty good job of covering the jazzier side of Dylan’s music for that year.
In fact, I’d missed out big time by forgetting two songs that Dylan did with the Wynton Marsalis Band, a big jazz band with a traditional line up of horns as in the late 1940s. The reason for my slip, or rather my poor excuse, is that these two performances were not part of Dylan’s regular tour schedule, not part of the NET, but part of a project by the Wynton Marsalis Band to perform with a number of different artists. Dylan took time out from the NET in early July to make these recordings, which are live.
So here they are. I have to say that Dylan sounds rather subdued, if not constrained. He sounds oddly flat. He certainly doesn’t sound as relaxed as he does with his regular band. These performances are interesting, rather than exciting. My own feeling is that Dylan would have needed more performing with this band to properly find his feet. He does sound as if he is not entirely in his element, and perhaps a little nervous; Wynton Marsalis is one formidable cat.
I’m also rather surprised that Dylan chose two of his old stand-bys, ‘It Takes A Lot to Laugh, It Takes A Train to Cry’ and ‘Don’t Think Twice’ rather than his newer, jazzier songs like ‘Million Miles’ or ‘Summer Days.’ These might have been a better fit.
Here’s ‘It Takes A Lot to Laugh’
At least that one is a blues, and swings. ‘Don’t Think Twice’ sounds like even a more awkward fit.
Don’t Think Twice
Back with the regular NET, I also missed this jazzy performance of ‘Sugar Baby’ from “Love and Theft”. The difference from the album version is that here (Pittsburgh, 7th Nov) Dylan gives the song more swing. It becomes less dirge-like. The song is a melancholy reflection on a past relationship with that wider context that Dylan is so masterful at providing:
Every moment of existence
seems like some dirty trick
Happiness can come suddenly
and leave just as quick
Any minute of the day the bubble could burst
Try to make things better for someone,
sometimes you just end up making it a thousand times worse
Sugar Baby
I finished off Part 2 with two wonderful performances of ‘Summer Days,’ one from the famous Glasgow concert and the other from Rochester, equally brilliant. If you didn’t catch those, don’t miss them. However, I missed out the most interesting, if not the best. At Comstock Park (24th August), Dylan played the song with well-known jazz guitarist Tommy Morrongiello. Morrongiello rips into it and Dylan does his usual sterling performance. I might have missed this because the recording is not quite as crisp as those from Glasgow and Rochester.
Summer Days
Enough with my sins of omission! Hovering close to my list to include in the Jazz Connection post was this rocking version of ‘To Be Alone With You.’ I have a fondness for the rip-snortin performance of this song from 2003, where Dylan appears to be channelling Jerry Lee Lewis, and while Dylan’s vocal is similar in this 2004 performance, the backing is quite different, and reminiscent of early jazz-influenced rock and roll. Listen to the backing carefully, and you can imagine it played with horns, late jump jazz style. If the original ‘Rock around the Clock’ man, Bill Haley, had played this song he might have done it like this. Of course, he could never have sung it like this. (20th March, Toronto)
To Be Alone With You
Of course, there are crossovers between blues and jazz. Each has influenced the other in their evolution. In 1963 the great blues singer Sonny Boy Williamson released a song called ‘Help Me,’ which built a strong blues riff that Dylan was to use in these later versions of ‘It’s All Right Ma.’ If you want to hear the origin of that riff, and Sonny Boy’s recording can be found here.
Interestingly, thinking of Dylan’s most recent album, the Blues Foundation describes Sonny Boy as ‘a strong-willed bluesman known for his rough and rowdy ways.’
However, whether or not that riff entirely suits ‘It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ is another matter. Maybe I can’t get past the fast-paced, solo acoustic versions Dylan played right from the start in 1964, and which you can hear with wonderful effect in 1991 (See NET, 1991, Part 1), but this later arrangement is too rigid, even though Dylan gives it a bit of swing. What makes ‘Help Me’ work is the simplicity of the lyric and the short lyrical line. Neither of those things are true of ‘It’s All Right Ma,’ the words don’t always fit easily into the musical line, and the tempo may be a little lumbering for the song. That’s a personal take; it’s still a powerful song, powerfully performed. This is another one from Glasgow.
It’s All Right Ma (A)
Much as I like the Glasgow performance, I think it is eclipsed by this one from Amherst, 20th Nov. A superior vocal performance?
It’s All Right Ma (B)
Another protest song that Dylan gave a bit of a swing in 2004 is ‘Hard Rain.’ You could almost waltz to it. In that respect it’s moved a long way from the original folky ballad of the original. Giving a lilt to it like this certainly moves it along, although it’s far from jazz. I’ve included it here because of the outstanding nature of this acoustic performance. There’s nothing old and tired about this performance, from Motil, 7th October. Dylan tears out the vocal like there’s no tomorrow (and maybe there isn’t). Listening to this masterpiece, inadequately described as an ‘anti-war’ song (it is, but it is also much more than that), I can’t help thinking of the present war in Ukraine. I saw a heart-rending picture of a child with a rifle from that war, and thought of that line from the song ‘I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children.’
Time doesn’t age this song, not as long as we are still ‘wounded in hatred’ and war continues. The song has never been timelier. Its images feel like they are hot off the press.
Hard Rain
We switch countries to catch this performance of ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’ from the Glasgow concert, and the light-hearted harp break that kicks the song off. I was never going to be able to fit in all of Dylan’s outstanding harp solos into one post, although I got quite a few of them into my last post, NET, 2004, part 3. I had a few songs left on the cutting room floor from that post, and ‘I’ll Be your Baby Tonight’ was one of them, as the harp work is brief enough, but it’s a great mood setter. This is a nice change of pace.
I’ll be your baby tonight.
Now for a rarity. We have to go back to 1995, and before that to 1992, to find ‘Unbelievable’ from Under The Red Sky. It’s a hard-hitting rocker aimed, as is so much of Dylan, at the rank, godless materialism of modern America:
It's undeniable what they'd have you to think,
It's indescribable it can drive you to drink.
They said it was the land of milk and honey,
Now they say it's the land of money.
Who ever thought they could ever make that stick.
It's unbelievable you can get this rich this quick.
That’s as trenchant as anything Dylan wrote during his protest era. Just as trenchant, hitting another familiar Dylan theme, the imminence of war, we find this:
Kill that beast and feed that swine,
Scale that wall and smoke that vine,
Feed that horse and saddle up the drum.
It's unbelievable, the day would finally come.
Dylan is the master of fusing the political and the personal. His anguish at the state of the world slips easily over into a personal anguish. This is what that godless materialism has done to our relationships:
Once there was a man who had no eyes,
Every lady in the land told him lies,
He stood beneath the silver skies
And his heart began to bleed.
Every brain is civilized,
Every nerve is analyzed,
Everything is criticized when you are in need.
The ending is as dark as you might care to find.
Turn your back, wash your hands,
There's always someone who understands
It don't matter no more what you got to say
It's unbelievable it would go down this way.
That’s as true today as it was in 1991.
I’m quoting at length here, partly because the chance won’t come again, this is the last time Dylan will perform the song, and partly because to my mind these are some of the finest lyrics Dylan wrote. It’s too easy to miss them because of the hectic pace of the song. I keep imagining how the song might sound if he slowed it down a bit, lingered over those incomparable lyrics.
You go north
And you go south
Just like bait in a fish’s mouth
Must be living in the shadow of some kind of evil star
It’s unbelievable, it would get this far
Again, thinking of Ukraine, these lines give me a shiver.
Unbelievable
I think that ‘I Believe in You’ qualifies as a rarity, although it was performed twelve times in 2004, having something of a revival in 2003/4. This passionate avowal of faith belongs to Dylan’s gospel period (1979 – 81), although taken out of context, it doesn’t have to be seen as a Christian song, more like a great love song. It is however a demanding song in terms of the vocal. We have to be convinced of the intensity of that faith that is unshaken by anything and everything that the world can throw at it, when you are forsaken by friends and when ‘white turns to black.’
This Glasgow performance achieves that, no question.
I believe in you
That’s it for now. Back soon with a look at of the rockers Dylan performed in 2004.
Well we’re living in the shadows of a fading past
Trapped in the fires of time
I’ve tried not to ever hurt anybody
And to stay out of the life of crime
And when it’s all been said and done
I never did know the score
One more day is another day away
From the girl from the red river shore
Cosmologists will agree. Before the Big Bang there was an endless, timeless Nothing, then a brief flash of light, gravity, sulphur storms, atoms, C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate and event horizons, and after this brief flash, the flash in which we exist, the All shrinks back to a singularity and there will be an endless, eternal Nothing again. Nothingness without any Something, so also without matter, time or light. Nabokov puts it a little more simplified: “Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses,” and Dylan a little more poetically: “We’re trapped in the fires of time.”
This fifth stanza of Dylan’s “Red River Shore” illustrates (finally) that the song is a Time Out Of Mind song. After the New Morning rhetoric of the first verse, the Freewheelin’ imagery of the second, the Nashville Skyline clichés of the third, and the Street-Legal poetry of the fourth, we’re back to the world-weariness of “Standing In The Doorway”, the melancholy of “Not Dark Yet”, the despondency of “Cold Irons Bound”. Just take the opening line.
“Living in the shadows of a fading past” is a great, classic line with which Dylan announces in eight words the overarching theme of his twenty-first-century oeuvre. It echoes À la recherche du temps perdu and Neil Young’s Dylanesque gem “Time Fades Away”, the old protest song “Which Side Are You On?” (are we living in the shadow of slavery) and Original Sin, it has the couleur of every film noir between The Maltese Falcon and Touch Of Evil, and it would have been an even nicer album title than Time Out Of Mind.
Classical, almost archaic beauty – though therefore not too original. All the stronger hits the subsequent image, trapped in the fires of time.
“Fires of Time” is a rather unusual image. Which is remarkable, really – after all, it’s a not too far-fetched, extremely strong and very visual metaphor to express the destructive power of Time. It has the potential to trigger a plethora of related metaphors with burning, heat, flames and smoke, with the added bonus of the religious, autumnal connotation of ashes to ashes. But Dylan resists that temptation – this one, remarkable trapped in the fires of time remains unexplored, and colleagues don’t pick it up either after this. Yes, a single exception like The Bellamy Brothers song makes an attempt. Little successful, unfortunately – their “The Fires Of Time” (on The Anthology, Vol. 1, 2009) is a somewhat overcooked throwaway with a tiresome enumeration of historical milestones à la Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire”, but full of stylistic embarrassments (“The Roman Empire fell, they found some dinosaur bones”). And with a modest salute:
From Buddy Holly to Hendrix
From Haggard to Jones
From Elvis to Dylan
From The Beatles to The Stones
Well, the guitars twang
And the poetry rhyme
And they rocked our world
Right through the Fires of Time
… with some awkwardly mixed away, presumably Hendrixesque-meant guitar fury after “Hendrix”, and ditto, presumably Dylanesque-meant harmonica honking after “Dylan”.
The Bellamys are forgiven – they have given the world “Let Your Love Flow” and “If I Said You Had A Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me”, so they can do whatever they like. And in their defence: Dylan doesn’t do any better with fires of time either.
The remainder of this fifth stanza, after that intriguing and potentially fruitful opening, is disappointingly flat – and stylistically rather weak, if we are honest. I’ve tried not to ever hurt anybody and to stay out of the life of crime is a bumpy verse line with clichés nonchalantly pasted together, and the following And when it’s all been said and done I never did know the score is of the same ilk (though less bumpy). It even comes awfully close to filler lyrics; as if the song poet has already designed the beautiful closing line One more day is another day away from the girl from the red river shore, and for now just bridges the road thereto with rather haphazard grab finds from his inner jukebox.
I’ve tried not to ever hurt anybody has a somewhat alienating “John Wesley Harding” echo, for example (he was never known to hurt an honest man), although it is quite likely that Dylan has long since forgotten that song. Oh well, he knows the word combination from dozens of other songs too, of course. Charley Pride could, after borrowing I could never be free in the third verse, be a candidate supplier again (from “You’re So Good When You’re Bad”, his no.2 hit from 1982). But another Nashville Cat probably appeals more to Dylan;
So let me say this, I never tried to hurt anybody
Though I guess there's a few, that I still couldn't look in the eye
If I've got one wish, I hope it rains at my funeral
For once, I'd like to be the only one dry
… the bittersweet, funny “I Hope It Rains At My Funeral” from 1971. By Tom T. Hall, who is so wittily dismissed by Dylan in his 2015 MusiCares Speech. He recalls reading an interview in which Tom was “bitching about” a James Taylor song. Coincidentally, Dylan tells, he was just listening to a song by Tom T. Hall on the radio; “I Love” – indeed a quite corny, über-sentimental drag of a song;
“Now listen, I’m not ever going to disparage another songwriter. I’m not going to do that. I’m not saying it’s a bad song. I’m just saying it might be a little overcooked. But, you know, it was in the top 10 anyway.”
Still, he does quote effortlessly half the lyrics – and Tom T. Hall’s name is of course also under “I Washed My Face In The Morning Dew” and especially the successful “Ode to Billie Joe” rip-off “Harper Valley P.T.A.”, so The Storyteller probably does have some credit with Dylan.
Somewhere in that same corner of that inner jukebox, Dylan also finds the other clichés, or so it seems. When it’s all been said and done we know from a hundred songs, and if Dylan’s muse indeed does hang around in the country corner at the moment, then it may have been lifted from Charlie Rich’s “Who Will The Next Fool Be” – or picked up via Jimmie Davis’ evergreen “It Makes No Difference Now” (recorded by everything and everyone from Gene Autry to Willie Nelson and from Fats Domino to Merle Haggard, but the ultimate version is Ray Charles’). Although Dylan himself will attribute this particular line to Buddy Holly’s “I’m Gonna Love You Too”;
“Buddy Holly. You know, I don’t really recall exactly what I said about Buddy Holly, but while we were recording [Time Out Of Mind], every place I turned there was Buddy Holly. You know what I mean? It was one of those things. Every place you turned. You walked down a hallway and you heard Buddy Holly records, like “That’ll Be the Day.” Then you’d get in the car to go over to the studio and “Rave On” would be playing. Then you’d walk into this studio and someone’s playing a cassette of “It’s so Easy”. And this would happen day after day after day. Phrases of Buddy Holly songs would just come out of nowhere. It was spooky. But after we recorded and left, you know, it stayed in our minds. Well, Buddy Holly’s spirit must have been someplace, hastening this record.”
(Murray Engleheart interview for Guitar World, 1998)
“Phrases of Buddy Holly songs would just come out of nowhere.” And then Elvis probably does supply I never knew the score (from Lonnie Donegan’s “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”). Or a dozen other songs, of course; the phrase is as generic as the life of crime in the verse line before. It is tempting, though, to think that Dylan subconsciously is revealing a secret love for the immortal Mose Allison there, and for his superior “Your Mind Is On Vacation”;
You're quoting figures, you're dropping names
You're telling stories about the dames
You're always laughin' when things ain't funny
You try to sound like you're big money
If talk was criminal, you'd lead a life of crime
Because your mind is on vacation and your mouth is
Working overtime
Mose Allison – Your Mind Is On Vacation
… not a very likely scenario, no. But if so, Dylan must have taken the last line to heart: “If you must keep talking please try to make it rhyme”.
To be continued. Next up: Red River Shore part 8: He is no one
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Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
Here the whole concept of doing a study of some of the best cover versions of Dylan’s songs (which is the point of A Dylan Cover a Day in case you hadn’t noticed) falls apart. Because there is no definitive version of the song by Dylan with which we can compare it.
